My chess is alive and kicking, I’ve been playing quite a bit lately, I feel I’ve been improving steadily, I’ve won a tournament, and, most importantly, I’ve had a lot of fun playing chess and hanging around chess players. To drop a rather banal pearl of wisdom on you, I believe the socializing aspect of chess is completely underestimated when it comes to chess improvement. Quite apart from the fact that the easiest way to improve is to analyze your games with better players, studying/playing/analyzing on your own gets tedious and depressing after a while, whereas mingling with good people who share your enthusiasm for chess is just plain fun, and in most cases motivating. You may not always be inspired to work harder on your game, but at least you have a good time and won’t start to perceive chess as drudgery.

Having said that, let’s take a look at what’s been happening online! Perusing my blog roll, I was happy to see that at least some of the blogs back from when chess improvement blogging was all the rage are still active: for example Katar, LinuxGuy, Chess Novice, Getting to 2000, Rolling Pawns, Castling Queen Side and, much to my delight, Confessions of a Chess Novice :) I took the liberty of keeping only those blogs in the blogroll whose last post dates back no further than January 2014. I’m sure many others are still lurking and playing, and of course I can sympathise with anyone who’s dropped chess blogging in favour of playing, or work, or family, or what have you … I’m no exception. Work has indeed been a factor, although I think mostly the decline of my blog is due to the fact that my own improvement can no longer be expressed in gifs, the ideas often being too complex. Well, that’s not quite true, I’m also just a lazy rook and churning out these gifs is quite a bit of work. ;) In any case, hope to see you around, and have fun in all your chess adventures!